Late Night Texting
by Dragon'sHost
Summary: For the life of her, Lucy cannot figure out who it is that keeps sending her weird late night texts.
1. Chapter 1

**This was supposed to be for a drabble request for siriusly-random, but it kind of got away from me. So it ended up with its own story slot, ahahaha.**

 **The original prompt was:** _"Stop texting me weird stuff so late at night."_

 **Enjoy!**

* * *

It had been going on for some time now. Lucy would be on the brink of sleep after a long day with her team, and then she'd suddenly find herself jolted awake by the jingle of her lacrima phone. A jingle she was rapidly coming to despise. If she could have turned off the sound, she would have, but as luck would have it her current alarm clock had met its demise a while back and Lucy wasn't exactly awash in funds to replace it. So she was stuck with the alarm she'd programmed into the phone. Which meant leaving the sound on at night.

She was pretty sure that whoever it was that was sending her the weird pictures didn't mean to do so. It wasn't a number she recognized, nor was it from her contacts. Chances were good that it was a misdial that the perpetrator never noticed. Lucy would have informed them of the mistake long ago, but as the wrong number calls tended to happen so late at night… Lucy tended to just roll over and fall asleep again, forgetting all about it in the morning.

And to be fair, the photographs they sent were often hilarious. Like the one of a Vulcan trying to woo a mannequin. Or one that she could have sworn was the aftermath of one of Team Natsu's jobs – broken fountain and shattered cobblestones with the fish statue upside down. It felt far too familiar to Lucy. Like it wasn't the first time she'd seen it.

But she was fast losing any patience or sympathy she might have had for the wrong number dialer. After one night's rest too many interrupted, it was finally time to put an end to this.

Eyes bleary with sleep, she furiously tapped out a message. "Stop texting me weird stuff so late at night."

Several minutes passed by without a response, and it wasn't long before Lucy was asleep again, phone in hand.

When she awoke the next morning, she looked down at the device clenched in her hand. She vaguely remembered messaging someone the night before, though she was having a hard time recalling what it was. Opening up the message log, she stared blankly at the screen.

"Seat exiting weird fuso latte alright."

What in the world was that supposed to mean…? What had she been trying to say before autocorrect and sleep had scrambled the message…?

Her phone let out a cheerful chirp, and a new message flashed across the screen.

" _How much did you have to drink last night?"_

Lucy stared for a long minute at the innocuous message.

 _ **Ding!**_

" _Seriously, how much. Alcohol poisoning is a serious problem. And I don't want to hear anything about how much Cana can drink, that woman isn't human and doesn't count."_

That… that was a weird coincidence. What were the odds that the person misdialing her would also know Cana?

 _ **Ding!**_

" _The read receipts are turned on, Lucy. I know you're seeing this. Answer me."_

Okay, now she was _really_ confused. Who the hell was this?!

Before she could ponder it properly, her phone started to ring. The caller ID named it the mystery person, and Lucy felt cold sweat running down her back. Well… here was a sure-fire way to find out. Provided she was able to recognize the voice on the other end, that is. The chances were not exceptionally high of that, but Lucy found herself answering the call anyway.

"Hello?"

" _Good, you're up,"_ said a gruff voice at the other end of the line. _"What in the world was that garblygook you sent me last night?"_

"Um…" Lucy wracked her brain, trying to place the voice, but kept coming up empty. "I was half asleep. I'm not sure what I was trying to say, either."

The man laughed at her explanation. "Yeah, that sounds about right. Well, it was nice hearing from you. I gotta go, but let's talk again soon."

With that, he hung up, and Lucy was left still none the wiser about whom she was conversing with and having lost the opportunity to ask.

From then on, the things he sent her simultaneously got weirder and more familiar to her. Like the one picture he sent that was a yellow and black blur, with the caption, "Action shot." Or the cryptic text about "feather duster" stabbing someone in the arm with a feather. These things kept tickling the back of her mind, and yet the answer still lay just outside her grasp.

Despite herself, Lucy soon found herself looking forward to her mysterious penpal's late night messages. She even sent him a couple as well. One time, after sending him a picture of a town Natsu destroyed with the caption, "The town is saved!" prompted him to call her. Whereupon nothing was actually said, as he was laughing too hard to formulate words. Leading to him hanging up with the conversation having never even started much less progressed.

It was only much, much later that Lucy realized that she could have shown the number to her friends and asked who it was, since she had gleaned that they seemed to share a friend circle. But now she was kind of enjoying the mystery of it all. Just a little bit. So she continued to keep it to herself.

Not that all this went unnoticed by her teammates for too long. Happy – ever the observant one – was the first to pick up on something going on with Lucy and her lacrima phone. Natsu then laughed in her face when Happy suggested that Lucy had gotten herself a boyfriend. Now that stung a little.

Gray and Erza had gotten their teasing in but had then promptly forgotten about the whole thing in a couple of days. Which was a mild relief as far as Lucy was concerned.

Because she was beginning to feel a little strange about the whole thing. Especially since the conversation was now going two ways. The guy seemed genuinely funny and in tune with all the craziness that tended to descend upon her life.

Maybe… someday… she'd work up the nerve to ask him to meet with her…

Or so she explained to Cana, when the brunette confiscated Lucy's phone to make a call while the blonde was in the bathroom. She had "just happened across" the ongoing messages. Lucy knew that she should have password protected the thing, but there was just no way that wouldn't immediately raise red flags with her teammates over what she was potentially hiding from them.

In the end, Cana got the whole spiel about what was going on.

Once Lucy was finished, Cana stared blankly at her for several long moments.

"It's Cobra, you realize that, right?"

Every cell in Lucy's body froze at the simple statement. "…Say what?"

Cana finally handed Lucy's phone back to her, a grin playing across her features. "Yeah, it was a few months ago when Crime Sorciere was here visiting. You got drunk as a skunk and asked for his phone number. Which, I may add, you were too drunk to actually enter correctly so he said he'd just message you first." She let out a hearty laugh. "I'm guessing you forgot all about it, huh? Lightweight!"

That… that cleared up a number of things. Lucy couldn't help but wonder why Cobra of all people had taken her up on the offer. Let alone been so friendly about the whole thing. It felt out of character.

Then again, given the heavily sarcastic nature of their messages, maybe he felt that he'd found a kindred spirit.

When he messaged her again that night, Lucy found herself replying without a hint of hesitation. Although it had gotten off to kind of a strange start, she decided that she treasured the connection they had formed through this. Why throw away a good thing? It might make a fun story to tell one day.

Though she did finally add his name to her contact list.


	2. Chapter 2

**Sorry for the mixup a couple of days ago - I accidentally uploaded another story's next chapter onto this one by mistake. Hopefully I deleted it soon enough and didn't confuse too many people too badly.**

 **I did decide to make a part 2 to this after all, though. A joke I wanted to make popped into my head, so I just had to extend this. This new chapter features... Lucy being an even bigger dumbass than before.**

 **Enjoy.**

* * *

"So your phone is broken?" the salesman asked, with a cheery smile on his face. "Not a problem, we can pull all your contacts and photos off of it, and then…"

"I don't think you understand," Lucy interrupted, heaving a heavy sigh, the incriminating evidence contained in a sandwich bag held at her side. "I don't think there's… anything left to salvage."

"Show me the phone and I'll see what I can do, then."

Lucy lifted the bag, and saw the eager light in the salesman's eyes die. Carefully, she upended the bag, the scattered pieces of broken phone clattering across the countertop. She and the salesman alike stared at the remains of her lacrima phone in an apathetic stupor. "Broken" didn't quite seem an adequate term for the jumble of shattered crystal shards and melted pieces of plastic. "Obliterated" was a much more accurate descriptor. If Lucy could travel back in time, show the remains of the phone to her past self, her past self wouldn't even believe that the bits and pieces were once a functioning object, let alone her own lacrima phone.

Finally, the salesman sputtered, "I see what you mean. So what I can do is… um… I'll take these off of your hands, and we'll see about getting you a new lacrima phone. I don't think I'll be able to recover your information, but your phone number can remain the same."

Nodding, Lucy thanked him for his time. As he disappeared into the back, she sighed once more.

Really, how did her team manage to pull stunts like this? She hadn't even fully paid off the previous device. Somehow, she had managed to wrangle a promise out of the dynamic duo most responsible for this that they would pay her back for a new phone, but Lucy doubted that was ever going to actually happen.

Once she had her new phone in hand, and had paid a sizeable down payment on the exorbitant cost of it, Lucy set about adding the few contacts that she knew by heart. Her favorite takeout place being first, along with her teammates. It made her contact list look very sparse, she thought drearily. It had been much fuller before.

Well, she was just going to have to add everyone again one by one.

* * *

It was two days after Lucy had gotten her new phone, and five after the initial destruction of the previous one, that Lucy heard the distinct jingle of an incoming text, late at night.

Or rather, it was very, very early in the morning, she decided through a groggy stupor. Groping around for the phone, Lucy pulled it close to her and winced at the bright light emanated from the screen as she turned the volume down to nothing.

"Hey, you okay?" the message read. "Tried calling and texting a couple of days ago and didn't get a response."

Her phone vibrated slightly as another text came through from the same person. "Been on a job, so I wasn't able to ask again until now."

Lucy tapped away at the keypad. "Sorry," she told the unknown texter. "Team destroyed phone. Lost contacts. Who is this?"

She waited for a minute, puzzled when it took the mystery person a while to respond. Maybe they were laughing too hard to. Lucy knew that most people found her team's destructive inclinations downright hilarious, even if it did cause her a number of problems.

Finally, they responded, "Erik."

Before she could process the reply, they texted again. "And why does that not surprise me?" Lucy could practically hear the sarcasm coming through the screen. "So how did it happen?"

"Long story short," she grumbled aloud as she typed, "Natsu melted it and Gray thought he could fix it by freezing it. So it shattered into a million pieces, in addition to still being melted."

"Holy shit that's ducking priceless."

"Ducking?" Lucy questioned, an eyebrow raised.

"Damn autocorrect."

That was fair. "I'm going back to bed now, talk later."

"Night."

Lucy set her phone back down on her nightstand, only just barely remembering to turn the sound back up on the thing so she could wake up in the morning for her team's next job.

Blearily staring up at her dark ceiling, she wracked her brain.

"Who the hell is Erik?"

* * *

The light of morning brought no further answers to Lucy. She gazed at the messages from the night before, her confused mind furiously running around and trying to dredge up just who this "Erik" could possibly be and how she knew him.

Pulling on her knowledge gleaned from many years of reading mystery novels, Lucy tried to catalog every clue she could find in the messages.

He clearly knew her on some level, if he had been worried when she didn't text back. By that logic, it had to be someone she was generally pretty good at responding to. He also mentioned a long job, so he was likely either a mage or someone she knew from her reporting days. The fact that he was familiar with her teammates' antics didn't really narrow things down, unfortunately. The entire _world_ knew about Gray and Natsu's sheer talent for causing collateral damage. Even if he had managed to avoid every newspaper for the past twenty years, if he knew her to any degree then Lucy was sure to have complained about them to "Erik" at some point.

A flash of inspiration struck her in the shower, her fist clenching at the brilliance of the thought and accidentally squirting her in the eye with shampoo.

What if she really knew them by a _nickname?!_

Lucy knew of three people in her guild who had changed their names either once or multiple times. Since Bisca was… well… female, that knocked her out of the running. So that left two people it could possibly be!

Now all Lucy had to do was figure out a way to surreptitiously weasel out of them what their true names were.

Jet and Mest wouldn't know what hit them.

* * *

"You were so close," Mest told her. "So close… and yet _so very far_." He pinched his nose, his expression one of pure agony. "How did you miss the mark _that_ badly?" Wasn't Lucy supposed to be one of the smarter members of the guild?

Her face burned hotter the longer he spoke. "Look, I'm sorry, okay? But it was a reasonable expectation. I mean… how many times have you changed your name, again?"

Mest shook his head at her. "Lucy. I've only changed my name twice. Once to Doranbolt, and then back to Mest."

"That you changed it more than once is reason enough," Lucy defended herself.

"I was a _spy_ , Lucy."

She continued to press her case. "But you _forgot_ that you were a spy, so does it _really_ count?"

The man gestured somewhat helplessly. " _Yes._ It _does_. And also, let's leave my past mistakes out of this! Right now we're discussing how you just walked up and started addressing me as _Erik._ "

Lucy let out a groan, frustration and embarrassment eating away at her inside. "I know, not my brightest plan, but can you help me? Do you know who Erik is?" She grabbed him by the shoulders and started to shake him. "Please, Mest! I have no idea who this is! Is it Jet?!"

"For the love of god, stop shaking me!" he protested. "I ain't a tree – the answer you want isn't just going to fall out of me!" Mercifully, Lucy then let go of him. Mest pressed a hand to his mouth, nausea rising in his throat.

"If you know, please tell me," begged Lucy. She raised a hand, but before she could grab hold of his arm, Mest backed away from her as much as his barstool would allow.

"Shake me again and the only thing that will come flying out of me is my lunch," Mest warned her. "Look, I'll tell you who it is. Just give me a second, would you?"

Mest sighed as she backed off and looked at him with expectant eyes. "It's… Cobra's real name. Cobra and Erik are the same person."

Understanding dawned on her, as did horror as her brain finally connected the dots. " _No_ ," she breathed out. "Oh god, not _again!_ "

"Again?!" squawked Mest. "This has happened before?"

Lucy grabbed the barstool next to him and sat down in it. She then plunked her face down on the countertop and sobbed.

Well, that answered that, Mest decided. He was going to have to pry the rest of the story out of her once her embarrassment and hysterical crying had subsided.

Sadly, there was no way Mest was going to be able to keep this from Cobra the next time he checked in on Crime Sorciere. Pesky Soul Listening magic. There was a very good chance that – knowing the man – Cobra would then laugh so hard he'd make himself sick. And then Lucy would have to face another bout of painful embarrassment upon Cobra's inevitable confrontation with her about it.

Mest patted her on the back somewhat awkwardly.

He did not envy her in the least.


End file.
